March 2025 Assessment Spotlight Interview
Dr. Laura Kolb and Dr. Dan Libertz
The English Department in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences
Q: Briefly describe the department and its programs.
A: Baruch’s English department offers advanced courses in literary study, linguistics, creative writing, and publishing; it prepares students for careers in publishing, law, business, teaching, writing–and indeed any sphere in which thinking critically and communicating effectively are key skills. The department is home to two core programs, in which almost every Baruch student takes classes: First-Year Writing and Great Works. In Writing I (ENG 2100) and Writing II (ENG 2150), students gain practice in critical reading and writing in a variety of contexts across an iterative writing process. Students then take either Great Works I (ENG 2800) or Great Works II (ENG 2850), global literature surveys covering texts from a range of cultures.
Q: Please explain your roles within the English Department at the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences?
A: Dr. Libertz: I am currently the Associate Director of the First-Year Writing program. Regarding assessment, I have previously chaired the English department assessment committee, have designed the First-Year Writing program assessment, and I am currently collecting and analyzing data for that assessment.
Dr. Kolb: I am currently the Director of the Great Works of Literature program. In terms of assessment, I have served as departmental assessment coordinator (completing an assessment of the major in 2022), and I am currently in the design phase of a program assessment for Great Works.
Q: The English Department has been engaged in several exciting assessment efforts! Can you describe them?
A: Dr. Libertz: There are two assessment initiatives occurring in First-Year Writing assessing separate learning goals under CUNY’s Pathways English Required Core.
In the first assessment initiative, we assessed the following goals by evaluating a sample of papers from First-Year Writing II.
- Read and listen critically and analytically, including identifying an argument’s major assumptions and assertions and evaluating its supporting evidence.
- Write clearly and coherently in varied, academic formats (such as formal essays, research papers, and reports) using standard English and improve one’s own and others’ texts.
- Support a thesis with well-reasoned arguments, and communicate persuasively across a variety of contexts, purposes, audiences, and media.
As a component of this initiative, we wanted to think about how students “improve one’s own and others’ texts” through revision. Thus, a rubric was developed that assessed the number of revisions students made to their drafts and the quality of those revisions. In doing so, we moved from simply evaluating the outcome and focused on the process and potential growth. The results of this assessment could help us think about professional development or resources we can post to our program’s A Teacher’s Guide to First-Year Writing.
To adjust for the absence of hired evaluators for the second project, we decided to employ a pre- and post- survey to all Writing I (ENG 2100) students in September 2024 and all Writing II (ENG 2150) students in April 2025 to assess the two remaining CUNY Pathways English goals:
- Demonstrate research skills using appropriate technology, including gathering, evaluating, and synthesizing primary and secondary sources.
- Formulate original ideas and relate them to the ideas of others by employing the conventions of ethical attribution and citation.
We are curious about what we can learn about how students perceive themselves as researchers who write (or writers who research) taking Writing I and II. For instance, if students’ self-perception of their research writing abilities goes up from Writing I to Writing II, does that mean we are doing a good job helping students navigate a chaotic information ecosystem and find sources that help enrich their writing? In what ways? If self-perception goes down, does that mean students are now more aware of the complexity of conducting primary and/or secondary research and incorporating it into their writing? If so, how can we encourage a positive view of encountering this complexity? Or, if self-perception goes down, does it mean we are not adequately transitioning them from the expectations they had in high school compared to their first year in college? If so, how so? If not, why not? The faculty are eager to explore these questions.
Dr. Kolb: The Great Works assessment is exciting to me because of the sheer range of assignments we have gathered to study. We are employing:
- traditional, argument-driven essays focused on literary analysis
- informal reading responses, which showcase the importance of writing as a way of consolidating and synthesizing ideas
- a set of podcasts, a really innovative assignment which will allow us to assess a course goal about which we aren’t able to capture much information: namely, students’ ability to present their ideas orally.
We’ll be assessing all our program-level goals, which are as follows:
Students who complete ENG 2800/2850 should be able to:
- interpret meaning in literary texts by paying close attention to authors’ choices of detail, vocabulary, and style
- discuss the relationship between different genres of literary texts and the multicultural environments from which they spring
- articulate a critical evaluation and appreciation of a literary work’s strengths and limitations
- present their ideas orally
- write critical essays employing: a strong thesis statement, appropriate textual citations, and contextual and intertextual evidence for their ideas
Q: Why did you choose this method(s)? How will this assessment(s) prove beneficial to the students and the program?? What aspects of this assessment were new? Successful? Challenging?
A: Dr. Libertz: We chose these methods for both efficacy and constraints. For reading student papers, we developed rubrics and split up the samples of student writing. Two readers applied rubrics together for the same group of students, for two separate readings of each student’s writing portfolio. Then, in November 2024, we were able to train WAC Fellows to help resolve disagreements by reading student papers and then deciding between the two scores of the two readers. It was meaningful for the faculty to come together to compare student drafts as this gives us a much better opportunity to understand student growth. Within the time constraints we had, we developed a rubric, “normed” readings so we were on the same page for applying it, and scored.
For the surveys, like with the readings, there is a lot of potential for trying to understand student growth since we are surveying them at the beginning of their fall semester (for many, their first semester in college) compared to a sample of students toward the end of their first year in college.
Dr. Kolb: We chose to include a wide range of assignments, rather than focusing on one type, in large part because this reflects pedagogical practice (and therefore student learning) in the program: most sections of Great Works include a mix of critical, creative, and low-stakes assignments. But we also wanted a range in order to be able to think meaningfully about all five of our learning outcomes. Our in-house, program-level goal for this assessment is to use our findings to (1) clarify and update our program goals and (2) consider bringing program goals in line with the department’s more general learning goals, which were recently revised. In what ways does the work received reflect the goals we have in place? In what ways do these goals – and the standards and practices of literary study they encapsulate – need updating, to reflect the learning that happens in Great Works classes in 2025?
Q: What have you learned during this assessment process thus far? What might you do differently in the future?
A: Dr. Libertz: Based on the results from the first assessment, we found that about half of the students engaged in revisions that made no meaningful difference or made a small meaningful difference in their second draft. This tells us that it might be worth our time to create professional development or develop resources for our teacher’s guide that incorporates ways to teach good practices of revision established by research, such as: the importance of engaging in “metacognitive practices [such] as using teacher commentary heuristically and centering attention on higher-order rhetorical concerns” (Lindenman et al., 2018, p. 601), addressing ways to deal with anxiety in revision like teaching students to name and reflect on feelings while revising (Ballenger & Myers, 2019), addressing how preferred forms of feedback do not always lead to the best revisions (Crook, 2022), and the importance of seeing revision as both holistic and recursive (Sommers 1980).
For the surveys that focused on the research writing goals, we collected 591 responses in September! We will distribute the second survey in April. I have experience using inferential statistics and, if time permits, I may consider delving deeper by matching the same students who took the pre- and post-surveys, as opposed to only comparing the aggregated results of the fall and spring.
Dr. Kolb: This is a small, practical detail, but an important one; before anonymizing student work to be scored, a member of the assessment team should create a key linking each anonymized piece of student work to the student’s EMPLID. This key then operates as a potential bank of demographic information. This is especially important if you’re running assessment on a major/minor, since it allows you to keep track of which assignments in the pool are by majors, which by minors, and which by neither.
Q: What would you recommend to faculty who want to engage in meaningful assessment? How can we better inform faculty of its value and impact on teaching and learning?
A: Dr. Libertz: I would recommend that faculty try to do the best they can under the material constraints we are all under at Baruch and at CUNY–and more generally in public institutions of higher education.
Dr. Kolb: I would recommend that faculty who want to engage in meaningful assessment start with research:
- How do similar programs or departments conduct assessment, within and beyond Baruch?
- How has their own program or department conducted assessment in the past? It is also important to keep colleagues apprised of the assessment process and its goals and to solicit feedback on that process and those goals. Assessments are outward-facing; they are part of the process of accreditation. But they are always also internally useful, as instruments that empower us to refine and instantiate our pedagogical values and mission.
Interviewed by Melissa Sultana, Office of Assessment
March 14, 2025